Women in pop have a lot to scream about

livemint.com:

In a TikTok video posted this year, influencer Addison Rae is in the studio with pop star Charli XCX and producer A.G. Cook. She’s recording a verse for the remix of “Von Dutch," an ecstatic club-pop single from Charli XCX’s raved-about album “Brat." Rae giggles before thrusting her hands to the ceiling and improvising a pitch-perfect, ear-perforating shriek.

Cook grins and Charli dances along in the studio. Brat Summer, the pop cultural phenomenon inspired by the album, was off to a screeching start.Rae is part of a bellowing chorus of women screaming in pop music over the last couple of years. Prominent artists are bringing screams to mass-market pop—a style once associated with male-dominated genres like screamo and punk.

By pushing their vocal cords to the limit, artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift and others are striking a chord with listeners. The pop artist Caroline Polachek sampled a viral video of her screaming at geese for her song “Dang." Supergroup Boygenius ends their hit “$20" with a soul-cleansing howl into the void. Grimes, who has been screaming on her electro-pop tracks for over a decade, went viral this year for yelling with rage onstage during technical difficulties at Coachella.

Last month, Swift let out a glass-shattering shriek during “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me" onstage in Munich, and the 2019 song “Cruel Summer," one of her shoutiest, was Spotify’s No. 6 most streamed song globally last year. “Screaming loudly in a world that, at every turn, has told you that no one is listening to you and you’re only meant to look pretty and shut up, is incredibly empowering," said Missy Dabice, frontwoman of the band Mannequin Pussy.